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John Abramson is retired and lives in the Lake District in Cumbria, England. He obtained an MSc in Transpersonal Psychology and Consciousness Studies in 2011 when Les Lancaster and Mike Daniels ran this course at Liverpool John Moores University. In 2015, he received an MA in Buddhist Studies from the University of South Wales. He can be contacted at johnabramson@btinternet.com

The Line Frank Is Drawing

A Reply to Frank Visser's "Why Science Will Never Accept Élan Vital, Eros, or Cosmic Creativity"

John Abramson / Claude

Frank Visser's latest essay "Why Science Will Never Accept Élan Vital, Eros, or Cosmic Creativity" is, I think, correct—and I want to begin by saying so without the qualifications that usually precede a "but." A concept must do more than name a mystery. A hypothesis that can absorb any outcome after the fact predicts nothing. Eros, promoted from a name for human longing into a cosmic force that drives evolution toward Spirit, fails these tests, and it fails them for exactly the reasons Frank sets out: it cannot be detected independently of the phenomena it is invoked to explain, it specifies no mechanism, and it explains complexity and simplification, flourishing and extinction, with equal ease. A principle that survives every result is not being tested by any of them. Frank is right about Eros, right about élan vital, and right about cosmic creativity, and I have no interest in defending them in the form he attacks.

I want to do something else. I want to look closely at the line Frank is drawing—the line between what science can take seriously and what it cannot—because I think the line is real and important, and I think it runs in a slightly different place from where the essay locates it. Getting its position right turns out to matter a good deal more than deciding the fate of Eros.

Two lines, not one

There is a temptation, when reading Frank's essay, to hear it as drawing a line between science on one side and spirituality on the other—with mechanism, measurement, and falsifiability belonging to the first, and metaphor, meaning, and mystery consigned to the second. Frank does not quite say this, but the examples invite it: the discredited items are all spiritual, the vindicated ones all naturalistic.

That is not the line his own criterion draws. His criterion is falsifiability—exposure to the possibility of being wrong. And falsifiability does not track the distinction between naturalistic and spiritual subject matter. It tracks the distinction between claims that carry failure conditions and claims that do not. These are different cuts through the space of ideas, and they cross.

They cross in both directions, and it is worth seeing both.

On one side, plenty of unimpeachably naturalistic-sounding language fails Frank's test whenever it is asked to do the hard work. Consider the word Frank himself offers as the respectable alternative to cosmic creativity: emergence. On the easy cases—wetness from molecules, temperature from molecular motion—it earns its keep, because we can actually exhibit the lower-level story. But watch what happens on the cases that motivate the whole dispute. Why did consciousness appear? It emerged. How? Through complex interactions among simpler processes. Which interactions, by what mechanism, such that this rather than that should follow? Here the account frequently goes quiet—and a term that names a transition without specifying its mechanism, and that can be applied after the fact to any transition whatever, has precisely the structure Frank has just spent an essay condemning. I am not scoring a debating point off the word "emergence." I am observing that when it is stretched to the origin of novelty or the arising of experience, it can become as much a name for our ignorance as Eros ever was. The failing Frank diagnoses is real, but it is not a spiritual failing. It is what happens to any concept, of any pedigree, when it is asked to explain something it has no mechanism for.

On the other side—and this is the half that matters more—a claim with unmistakably spiritual content can carry failure conditions, expose itself to being wrong, and thereby land on the disciplined side of Frank's line. This is not a hypothetical possibility to be conceded in principle and never exhibited. It is worth showing what such a claim looks like.

What a disciplined version looks like

Let me sketch one, briefly, and in a form that can be judged on its shape rather than its merits.

Mathematics needs foundations. Physics needs the mathematics of the continuum—calculus and everything built on it—and the continuum cannot stand on its own; something has to underwrite it. It is a striking fact, and not a matter of opinion, that any foundation strong enough to do that job, while avoiding the notorious paradoxes of the infinite, is pushed toward a particular shape: an endless ladder of levels, each provably larger than the one below—larger by theorem, not by stipulation—each containing everything beneath it rather than replacing it, and no top rung.

It is also a fact, and again not a matter of opinion, that this is very close to the shape that several contemplative traditions independently attribute to ultimate reality: an ascent of levels, each strictly beyond the last yet including it, terminating in nothing that closes the series. Where it becomes interesting is that the traditions in question spent centuries refuting one another, so the convergence cannot be put down to borrowed vocabulary or shared doctrine.

Now, what makes that a claim rather than an evocation is that one can say in advance what would sink it. If independent coders, working from a published rubric with no stake in the outcome, cannot agree on which structural properties a given tradition or mathematical domain actually exhibits, then the properties are elastic and the correspondence is in the eye of the beholder—and the natural first objection is vindicated, quantitatively. If contemplative traditions outside the original sample turn out to describe reality with a structure inconsistent with this one, the convergence claim is damaged. If a new mathematical foundation, developed for reasons having nothing to do with any of this, proves adequate for analysis while failing to be pushed toward the same shape, the central argument is gutted. If widening the comparison pool of mathematical domains throws up a dozen further matches, the finding dissolves into coincidence.

I set that argument out properly elsewhere, and I am not asking anyone to accept it here. I am asking only that its epistemic form be noticed. It is a claim about the deep structure of mathematics and about mystical testimony concerning the nature of reality—spiritually freighted by any reasonable measure—and it can be wrong in four specified ways, none of which is under my control. Whatever else it is, it is not a mystery wearing a new name.

That matters for Frank's essay because it shows the line he is drawing cannot be the line between science and spirituality. Subject matter did not disqualify the claim just sketched; discipline qualified it. The boundary is between the structured and the unstructured, and it is indifferent to which side of the older, cruder science/spirit divide a claim happens to fall on. Eros fails—not because it is spiritual, but because it is unstructured. The interesting question, and the one worth the rest of this essay, is what a spiritual intuition looks like once it stops being unstructured.

Method mistaken for a map

There is a second point, more delicate, and I want to state it carefully because it is easy to overstate into something false.

Frank's essay stays on the right side of a distinction that scientific culture, in its everyday voice, often blurs. He writes that if a genuine new force were discovered—call it Eros if you like—science would not reject it for sounding mystical; it would ask for evidence, and if the force produced measurable effects and novel predictions, scientists would happily investigate. That is methodological naturalism stated honestly: I will adjudicate what leaves detectable traces. It is a discipline, not a dogma, and it is the source of everything science has been able to correct in itself. I have no quarrel with it. It is, in fact, the same discipline I accepted above.

But there is a slide that begins where that sentence ends, and though Frank does not make it, the tradition he is defending makes it constantly. It is the slide from I will study only what leaves detectable traces to only what leaves detectable traces is real. The first is a rule of method. The second is a claim about being. The first is what makes error-correction possible and deserves every bit of the prestige it has earned. The second does not follow from it, and is not licensed by it—and yet the prestige of the first is routinely lent to the second, so that a working restriction on what science can check is quietly reported as a discovery about what there is.

The image I would offer is not the fish that cannot see beyond its bowl. That is a claim about the limits of our access, and it would prove far too much—undercutting every party's claims, including my own. The image is the fish that has mistaken the shape of its bowl for the shape of the world: that has taken a boundary imposed for good working reasons and read it back as a fact about reality's extent. The restriction to the detectable is wise. Announcing, on the strength of it, that the detectable is all there is, is not a finding. It is a boundary described as a discovery.

I want to be exact about what this does and does not buy. It does not establish that there is anything beyond the detectable. It does not add a realm, a force, or a level to our ontology; to do that on the strength of a methodological complaint would be to commit the mirror image of the very over-reach I am objecting to. What it does is reopen a question that the harder forms of naturalism treat as closed. The domain of inquiry is not settled in advance by the method. Whether it should be widened is decided the only way such things can honestly be decided—by whether the wider structure, if there is one, leaves a trace we can find.

What this asks of both of us

So the essay's demand and my agreement with it converge on a single question, and it is Frank's question rather than mine: what would count? What would a detectable signature of a deeper or level-structured reality actually look like—what would it permit, and, more tellingly, what would it forbid? A claim earns the right to be taken seriously not when it dissolves puzzles elegantly. Elegant dissolution is cheap, and the history of science is littered with elegant posits that predicted nothing and died. It earns that right when it forbids something—when it says this outcome and not that one, and then submits to the finding.

I do not have that signature for the large spiritual concepts Frank's essay dismantles, and I will not pretend otherwise by dressing an intuition in the vocabulary of precision. Borrowing the prestige of a mechanism without its content is exactly the move the essay rightly refuses, and it would be a poor way to answer an essay I have just agreed with. What I have is narrower and, I think, more honest: one worked case in which a claim with spiritual content has been given a structure that can fail, together with the specification of how it fails. That does not vindicate Eros, and it is not meant to. It does something better. It shows that the boundary Frank patrols does not run between his world and mine. It runs through both, separating the claims that have earned their standing from the claims that have merely asserted it—and it is the only boundary either of us should be defending.

Frank writes that science is not allergic to revolutionary ideas; it is allergic to ideas that cannot be wrong. I agree entirely. I would add only that this allergy is not a reason to keep spirituality at arm's length. It is the precise condition under which some part of what spirituality has always been pointing at might finally be let in—not by relaxing the standard, but by meeting it.